Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step ...

28 Chapter 2 Reaching for the Clouds
The Potential Value of the Clouds
What will cloud computing bring to your bottom line In essence, this is the
process of calculating the return on investment for the formation of clouds
around your enterprise. However, keep in mind that not all systems make
sense to outsource, and you have to be honest about the real costs and benefits.
We take a much deeper dive into the business case in Chapter 4, but we
address a few basic concepts here.
The first step is to determine the “as-is” state of a particular application
and/or business system, including the cost of operations, maintenance, design,
development, testing, deployment, and so on. From there, you determine the
“to-be” state with cloud computing resources.
In addition, you need to define the value of agility and expandability, or
the ability to change the information systems quickly as business needs change,
and the ability to scale or expand the systems as the processing load needs to
increase to support the business.
Finally, you need to consider the ability for your applications to take advantage
of other services, information, and applications that exist on cloud
computing platforms, avoiding having to write them from scratch. Make
sure to document all of this information and come up with a return on investment
that the business can expect—or not expect. You determine the
need to proceed at this point.
While most IT professionals think the value of cloud computing is widely
understood, the reality is that cloud computing requires some complex analysis
to determine its value. Indeed, many dimensions must be considered, including
the real cost of porting, the form and fit for the application, security
issues, compliance issues, and the cost of trusting another organization you
do not control. Again, we cover these issues in more detail in Chapter 4.
Cloud Computing Benefits and Drawbacks
Most of those who look at cloud computing look at the single dimension of
cost. While you can look at an on-premise solution and a cloud computing
solution as just a hardware and software acquisition lease-versus-buy decision,
the reality is that the benefits and drawbacks to cloud computing are
much more complex and far reaching.